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20 most sought-after high schools in 2013

Pace high school in Chinatown was the second most-sought after high school this year.Photo by Clara Hemphill

For the third year in a row, Baruch College High School had more applicants than any other school in the city, according to the Department of Education.

Nearly 7,500 8th graders applied for 120 seats at Baruch, a selective high school in Gramercy Park that only accepts District 2 students. It had 1,000 more kids apply than in 2012. Two-thirds of Baruch students are Asian. The high school has a 100 percent graduation rate and solid college prep.

Pace, which opened in 2004, accepts students citywide and does not screen its applicants. It had 6,040 students apply for 108 seats. About nine in 10 students graduated from Pace in 2012, and it does well with special education students. The student body is mostly African American and Hispanic. Of the top five most sought-after programs, Pace is the only unscreened school.

Eleanor Roosevelt, a selective school on the Upper East Side with a nearly perfect 2012 graduation rate, received 5,733 applicantsfor 125 seats. ELRO gives preference to students from District 2 and a majority of its students are white. It has a low poverty rate compared to other schools in the city: fewer than 1 in 5 students qualify for free lunch.

Because the DOE released a list of the top 20 high school programs, Midwood High School in Brooklyn appeared twice. Its selective humanities program was the 8th most popular, with 4,361 applicants. And 4,343 kids ranked Midwood's selective medical science institute, making that the 10th most sought-after program.

Every school on the DOE's top ten list last year appeared on the top 20 list this year, and many of those schools were top schools the year before, in 2011.

Thirteen of the city's most popular programs are selective high schools, which usually have high graduation rates because they weed out applicants who performed poorly in middle school. And five of the new small high schools opened under Mayor Bloomberg were among the 20 most popular.

One of those new small schools, the perennially popular Food and Finance barely made the "most popular" cut this year. Its unscreened culinary arts program had 1,000 fewer applicants this year than last, dropping it from the 10th most popular program to the 19th most popular with 3,600 8th graders applying for the school's 100 seats.

The top 20 list includes the number of 8th graders who listed the schools anywhere on their applications – it doesn't indicate how many students ranked the schools first. The DOE did not release the number of applicants for any other school.